Disc (3 page)

He frowned, “The fusion generator would only be a little smaller, but there’d be a
lot
less shielding.”

“Uh, yeah, that’s what I meant. The whole thing would be a lot smaller.” Vaz didn’t say anything, so she continued, “How much power are you talking about when you say ‘low-power fusion?’”

“About a quarter of a megawatt.”

Tiona’s eyebrows rose, “Wow! That’s somewhere around 350 horsepower?”

Vaz only nodded.

“So they could power cars?”

Vaz nodded again, “And houses. And small thrusters. Say about a meter and a half. With two 1.5 meter thrusters and two fusion generators you could make a flying car. The generators would only weigh a couple of kilos each.”

Holy crap!
Tiona thought.
That could make a
huge
difference for the entire world—in addition to giving us cool flying cars! It has to be the most important, but maybe I should find out what other projects he is working on.
“What’s on the last two screens? The one on the bottom right looks like the flying car?”

“Yeah. It’s probably silly to work on it before I finish the small fusion generators, but I got to thinking that I wanted to have something to put a small fusion generator in.”

Tiona agreed with that prioritization. “What’s on the screen next to it?”

“A personal flyer. Sixteen inch discs above and below the person riding it, joined by metal uprights on either side. Battery or a small fusion generator under the bottom one. Attitude discs top and bottom to make sure it stays right side up. Do you think it should have a seat on it? Or would people rather just stand on it? I was thinking people would just use it for short rides, like to work and back.”

Oh, that’s so cool!
Tiona thought. “Probably should make versions for both standing and sitting… or maybe one that can be changed from standing to sitting?” She stared at it, thinking.

Vaz said, “Which one do you think I should work on first?”

“Oh... Definitely the low-power fusion. Maybe I could work on designing the personal flyer?” she said wistfully, eyes still focused on that screen.

Vaz hesitated. He looked uncomfortable, “Okay. Don’t forget that you promised to do the precipitations for the big saucer though.”

Tiona laughed at his transparent worry, “Sure Dad. After our meeting you can tell me how you were planning to precipitate membranes in something that big, then I’ll start figuring out how to organize a team to do it?”

“Meeting?”

“Yes Dad, remember? We’re meeting with General Cooper, Dr. Eisner and Nolan at two.”

Vaz got a mulish look on his face…

***

As he walked up to the door of the Gettnors’ house, the house AI said, “Hello General Cooper. You may come in, Tiona is expecting you.”

The door was unlocked, so he opened it and stepped in. Tiona came around the corner wearing snug jeans and a cute little tank top. Cooper tried to keep his eyes from widening. She looked a
lot
better than she had that morning. She grimaced, “Come on in, but I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“Problem?”

She grimaced, “My dad. He doesn’t want to meet. Says he’s okay with whatever I decide.”

Cooper frowned, “I thought he agreed to meet?”

Tiona quirked an embarrassed grin, “He pointed out that he didn’t object when I told him you wanted to come over. However, he
didn’t
actually agree to meet or talk either.”

Frustrated, Cooper said, “It’s not so much that we need him to decide anything. What I’m hoping is that he can help us figure out how the thrusters might be used as weapons.
Especially
if he has any ideas how weaponization could be prevented.”

The house AI announced, “Dr. Eisner and Mr. Marlowe have arrived.”

“Let them in,” Tiona said absently to the AI as she got up and started moving toward the front door. Over her shoulder to Cooper she said, “Okay, I’ll try to talk to him about it again, but he really doesn’t want to.”

A minute later, Tiona led Eisner and Marlowe into the room. Marlowe looked completely unsettled by Tiona’s appearance. Cooper thought that, so far, the young man hadn’t seen anything else in the house. He wondered if it were just admiration of her looks or could Marlowe be in love with the girl?

Eisner, on the other hand, was looking around and Cooper could practically hear him thinking, “A multibillionaire lives here?!” Cooper himself had been struck by just how ordinary the Gettnors’ house seemed. Not at all what he’d expected for a multibillionaire.

Tiona welcomed them all, offered refreshments which everyone declined, and then turned to Cooper once again, “I’ll go down and try to talk him into it. Wish me luck.”

Cooper turned to the other two men and began outlining his concerns about the possibility of using thrusters to make kinetic energy weapons out of small asteroids.

Tiona came back out of the basement wearing an expression of both irritation and amusement. “He says he’s
not
a weapons expert. I told him about your concerns General Cooper, about asteroid impacts, weapon delivery and weapon platforms. He says he doesn’t have any other ideas and that the best way to prevent asteroid impacts would be to use thrusters to push them aside. Same thing for weapons and weapon platforms.” She sighed, “He isn’t usually this bad, but he has a bunch of projects going on that he’s really interested in. So, not only would he have to talk to a bunch of strangers, but he’d have to leave his little projects.” She shrugged, “I’m really sorry you came all the way over here for nothing.”

“Well,” Cooper said, “we can still have
our
little meeting. In fact, we’d just as well have it here so if we have a question we’d like to ask him, maybe you could go down and present it to him.” Cooper had a thought. He’d gotten the impression that people like Dr. Gettnor sometimes really liked telling people about the things that interested them. “Would he let us tour his lab?”

Although he knew better, Bob Eisner descended the stairs into the Gettnors’ lab
still
expecting a dark basement with a crazed scientist in a dirty lab coat wearing strange headgear. Reality couldn’t have been any different. Brightly lit, the lab was compulsively organized and so clean he couldn’t help but think it was just a display rather than a working research facility. Other than a central working area, the lab was packed with enviably state of the art equipment.

Incongruously, in the back corner hung a pair of light boxing gloves, a heavy bag and a speed bag. There was a small fridge, a microwave, and a hook with a couple sets of clothes on hangers. Overhead, he saw a pull-up bar with some handgrips for doing push-ups hung over it.
It’s like the guy
lives
down here!

Gettnor was just as odd as Eisner had thought back when he’d seen him at the thruster patent meeting with the lawyers. Gettnor took them around the lab enthusiastically describing the equipment, but without ever looking anyone in the eye.

When he got to the other end of the lab, he paused for a moment as if uncertain, then opened a pair of doors into an extension of the laboratory that had to be twice as big as the section they’d been in! Eisner blinked as he looked around. He felt certain that the lab was bigger than the house it was under! It must extend out under the yard somehow.

When it looked like Gettnor was about to describe the use of each machine in the lab extension, General Cooper gently interrupted him. “Thank you very much Dr. Gettnor. You don’t need to explain everything down here. We just wanted to get a general understanding and greatly appreciate your showing us around. We’re going to be upstairs trying to talk about how the thrusters might pose a danger. Before we go, can you make any comments on how they might be used as weapons?”

Gettnor didn’t look at anyone, keeping his gaze focused on the floor. Enough time passed that Eisner didn’t think Gettnor was going to respond to the query, but then he said quietly, “
Almost anything
can be a weapon.”

Cooper frowned, then said, “How do you mean?”

“Wheat flour, suspended in air, is explosive. You could build a small bomb in the kitchen with a Mason jar, a bit of flour, a battery, and some wire. A hack of your car’s AI could send it crashing into someone’s house.” He paused for a moment, then shrugged, “A thruster with a powerful battery and an AI controller could fly silently and slowly into proximity of a target, then accelerate to kill someone by kinetic energy transfer.” He paused for a long time while everyone else looked at one another with raised eyebrows, then continued, “There are
so many
ways thrusters could be used as weapons that your question just doesn’t make sense.”

Having said that, Gettnor turned, sat in the big chair in front of the wall covered with monitor screens and started talking quietly to his AI. Eisner started to step forward with a question, but Tiona waved to catch his attention, then shook her head. Without saying anything, Tiona ushered them all to the stairs and up out of the basement. “Sorry,” she said, “When he’s acting like that, there isn’t any point trying to talk to him.”

Wow,
Eisner thought,
talk about your proverbial tortured genius…

***

Kwon Hyuk Eun’s heart thumped in his chest. It felt like he’d been running, though he’d only been following his Bureau Chief through the halls at a walking pace. He had no idea why they’d been called before the supreme leader, but such calls were so dreaded that he’d had to urinate four times in the thirty minutes since they’d gotten the call.

Ever since he’d been assigned to the palace, Kwon had been worried that he might somehow encounter the supreme leader. He’d felt fairly safe as a junior member of the News Bureau. After all, his only job was to find international stories on the net which
might
interest the supreme leader
and bring them to his manager. Bureau Chief Park was the one who had to actually decide which stories would be placed in the précis delivered to the supreme leader.

Limited to two pages, the précis had to contain everything the supreme leader might think was important and nothing that he would find uninteresting. Kwon thought that making decisions about what actually went in the précis was giving Bureau Chief Park an ulcer.

For instance, two days ago Bureau Chief Park had vacillated for several hours about whether or not to put the story about the American rescue of their astronauts from an asteroid in the précis. The supreme leader did have an interest in space exploration, but did
not
like reading about American success. This space rescue apparently involved some kind of new technology. The supreme leader loved technology, often going to great lengths to obtain the latest high-tech devices for his personal use, even when it required circumventing his own laws regarding importation from proscribed nations. This new technology, however, appeared to be so new that no one really understood it, much less had it for sale. Eventually Bureau Chief Park had decided that the story shouldn’t go in the supreme leader’s précis.

Kwon worried that their summons had something to do with the asteroid rescue story because he was the one who’d brought it to the bureau chief and he’d been called too. He and Bureau Chief Park had had little interaction in the past two weeks other than for their extensive discussion of this particular story. He couldn’t imagine why else he’d been summoned to see the supreme leader
with
Bureau Chief Park if it didn’t have something to do with the asteroid rescue story.

When they arrived at the supreme leader’s office they were patted down as Kwon had been told was normal. Kwon’s stomach really began to churn however, when he realized that the people in the room were avoiding looking at him. It wasn’t the normal cultural tendency to avoid eye contact, instead it was as if
everyone
there were pretending he and Bureau Chief Park didn’t even exist.

Then, with a hand motion, a secretary led them in to see the supreme leader. Kwon didn’t look at the supreme leader. In his society you didn’t look anyone in the eye who ranked even one iota above you. Certainly,
no one
looked the supreme leader in the eye. No one even wanted to glance
close
to the supreme leader’s eyes for fear he might think he was being challenged!

Kwon and his bureau chief stood there silently for what seemed like several hours, but probably was only about ten minutes. Kwon urgently felt like he had to go to the bathroom again and worried that he would urinate in his pants—even though he rationally knew there couldn’t be more than a few drops in his bladder. Finally, he heard the supreme leader’s voice, “Park, why did I learn about the Americans’ new space technology from General Lee?”

Though the supreme leader did not sound angry, Kwon knew this meant little. As Bureau Chief Park tried to explain, supreme leader Kim rose from his chair and walked around to their side of the table. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the bureau chief’s hand begin trembling. Park’s explanation became halting and his voice broke several times.